Hi,
“We’re fighting for a fundamental transformation,” said Alex O’Keefe, Creative Director for the Sunrise Movement, in an interview last week with Cheddar, an online news show. “And we are winning, because why hide the president in an underground bunker? Why send the national guard out to peaceful protesters? They are terrified of black, brown, and white people united for revolutionary transformation.”
If you told me two years ago that those 61 words, in that order, would appear in one of my articles, I wouldn’t have believed you. As most things these days, it appears as if it is science fiction. I’m still getting used to the fact that not only is the climate movement winning right now, we’re achieving unbelievably more than we ever thought possible, much faster than we ever dreamed.
We are, at last, understanding that it’s the rich and powerful that are causing climate change, and the rest of us are locked into the apocalypse escalator unless we tear down that system and create something new that works for everyone.
Even before the most recent resurgence of Black Lives Matter uprisings, climate protests had been sweeping the world for months, from Standing Rock to Sweden, from Mumbai to Minneapolis. For the rest of this year, and for the foreseeable future, those will need to keep growing and keep escalating in demands until the old system is forever changed. That will be the quickest way for the climate movement to keep winning.
Two years ago, we were hoping for a movement like this, where people seeking justice in all of its forms would join in solidarity in an unstoppable force. Now, in June 2020, we know that uprising works. It’s being proven, right in front of our eyes.
This week’s good news on climate
That transformation can’t happen passively, it requires active dismantling and constant imagining real alternatives to structural racism and inequality.
This week, the Climate Justice Alliance, an umbrella group of US environmental justice organisations, released a “A People’s Orientation to a Regenerative Economy”, a 48-page document that could form the basis of the next steps of the broader climate movement.
If you want to do a deep dive into the world that could come during and *after* the Green New Deal, this blueprint is the place to start. This is the kind of world we are fighting for.
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